Gingerbread Dreams: Sweet Treats & Shoppe

Merry Christmas! I hope you’re having a wonderful holiday filled with all of your favorite things, including your favorite sweet treats. This Christmas season flew by faster than any other for me. I didn’t get a lot of things done before December 25 that I wanted to, and I’m determined to plan better for next year. But I did make gingerbread cookies and a gingerbread house, one of my favorite traditions. I love the way gingerbread tastes, and I especially love the decorating opportunities it offers. I love to pore over elaborate gingerbread cookie and house creations online and in books. When it comes to my own gingerbread house though, I keep it simple. My favorite shortcut is to use a kit that includes a pre-assembled gingerbread house. This year I bought two Ready to Decorate Gingerbread House kits from Wilton, a colorful candy house kit and a silver and gold themed kit which I plan to make later this week as a New Year’s house. I swapped out the houses between the two kits because the colorful kit’s house was so tiny! Both houses are smaller than my Halloween cookie house was, but I added gum drops to the top of the roof of the larger Christmas kit house to give it more height and I’m pretty happy with the size after doing so. So the New Year’s house will be the tiny house! I’ll have to get a photo of them side by side for comparison after I make it. I really loved my Halloween gingerbread house, and confess that I still had it displayed in my kitchen until I made the Christmas house! I couldn’t bear to throw it away until then. It held up really well. Usually the candy starts falling off and the icing cracking and getting old, and it was still as cute as the day I made it, when I tossed it.

I decided on the theme of a Gingerbread Shop for my gingerbread house. Wilton had a pack of pre-made icing decorations that included two little gingerbread men, a Gingerbread Shoppe sign and a Free Samples sign, which what inspired my design. I bought a couple other pre-made icing decoration packs to add to my house, because they really save time decorating your house and give it a professional touch I couldn’t pull off from scratch!

My first step when making a gingerbread house is to decorate the front of it. I feel like there’s a lot of pressure not to ruin the front of the house since it’s what you notice the most! I start with the door and then do the windows, my least favorite parts. Like my Halloween gingerbread house, this house came with small cracks in several parts of the house, so I was careful as I worked with it. I outlined and filled in the door with icing, then smoothed it out a bit with an angled spatula. The candy adds definition to the shape of the door and helps create the illusion that the door was outlined evenly. For the windows on the front and side of the house, I added candy shutters and holly garlands. Two peppermint sticks were attached with icing to the front corners of the house.

Next I decorated the roof, one of my favorite parts to do since it’s very forgiving if you make a mistake. I wanted to try a criss cross pattern, but I could tell it wasn’t going to work out, so I wiped the icing off with a slightly damp paper towel and started over. I use the damp paper towel trick when making mistakes decorating my cookies too. I went with an easy pattern for the roof I’ve done before, adding candy to the “shingles.” Next I lined up gum drops on the top of the roof and glued them down with icing. Then I piped the icicles off the roof’s eaves. Icicles are fun to do because you really can’t mess them up. Some of them will “melt” and fall down onto the cardboard base and you can just scrape them off and try again. They don’t have to be perfect. To create an icicle, I pipe a bead of icing on the roofline, then squeeze the icing bag and pull down. I let go of the pressure when it’s at a length I’m happy with and pull down to release the icing.

To finish my gingerbread house, I added the pre-made icing decorations like the signs, gingerbread men, wreath, and candy shapes on the front of the house. Usually for the snow on the cake stand, I use shredded coconut. Since I didn’t have any on hand, I used a combination of four white sprinkles. I added a layer of white sugar pearls, then sprinkled small white round sprinkles, clear sugar sprinkles and small snowflake sprinkles on top. It took me two and a half hours from start to finish to decorate my gingerbread house, not bad considering the Halloween cookie house took four hours!

On my Halloween blog post, I shared my friend Katie’s Halloween gingerbread house. I was thrilled she decided to do a Christmas house too! She made this sweet house with her mom the day before I made mine. I love how she used powdered sugar and candy decorations on the tray, and powdered sugar for snow on the roof. I’m also impressed because she had to assemble her house before decorating it. The structure looks so perfect! The piping along the house base and edges is so even and the handmade wreath, windows and door are so creative:

My gingerbread cookies took a lot longer than my house! I always set aside two days to complete them, one to bake them and one to decorate them. This year I decorated the house cookies the same day I baked them, then decorated the gingerbread people the next day. Altogether I decorated thirty cookies, and set aside an additional five cookie mistakes to eat later!

The house cookies took the longest and I spent the most time on them because I wanted them to be as cute as possible. For the past several years, I’ve decorated half my cookies as Colts football and Pacers basketball team gingerbread cookies but I was tired of that and I wanted to do them all in a Christmas theme this year. For the white icing, I used Betty Crocker cookie icing (my favorite), which I squeezed into a Wilton decorating bag so I could use a narrower tip for decorating. Since I waited so late to buy icing this year, the red and green Betty Crocker colors were sold out so I went with Great Value (Wal-Mart brand) red and green icing, the only red and green icing I could find in stock! I was skeptical of it, but I have to say it tastes and looks really good! Here is my complete set of decorated cookies:

I used cookie letter stamps on four of the cookies to write Mom, Dad, Denise, and 2019:

Not everyone likes gingerbread, so I was surprised to discover my 2.5 year old great nephew LOVED my gingerbread cookies on Christmas Eve! He wanted all of them, and made off with 4 or 5 of them, reserving each with a couple bites to ensure he could take them home to enjoy later too. It turns out Jimmy is obsessed with the fairy tale of the gingerbread man, after discovering a video of the story.

Run, run, fast as you can,
You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!

Don’t worry, there are still plenty of gingerbread men and house cookies left for Christmas and New Year’s Day. I’m off to fix a plate to take to my Christmas Day celebration with family now. Have a sweet Christmas with your loved ones!